Great news for Berlin’s startup scene: GroupM, one of the world’s largest advertising companies, announced today that it has agreed to acquire plista, a German startup specialised in digital advertising. The announcement was made jointly by Rudiger Wanck (GroupM) and Dr. Dominik Matyka (co-founder of plista).
One of our Berlin-based sources with a little bit more background information told us that the sum plista will be acquired for is in the range of €30 million. This is huge, given the fact that plista’s revenue in 2012 was ‘only’ about €3.9 million.
Founded in 2008 and employing about 100 people, plista specialises in innovative solutions
for targeted real-time digital advertising and content marketing. The company currently
operates in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, working for blue-chip clients including
Volkswagen, Sony, and Coca Cola, among others. With thousands of premium websites using plista’s recommendation and advertising technology, delivering billions of ads each month, plista is probably the leading recommendation and advertising platform in the German-speaking world. plista develops high-quality recommendation technology and uses it to deliver personalised reading recommendations and advertisements on websites and mobile devices.
Rudiger Wanck (GroupM) stated: “It is our ambition to develop plista from a multi-market operation into a global player; business in the DACH region will therefore continue as usual.”
In addition to the global media agencies Maxus, MEC, MediaCom and Mindshare, GroupM’s global network includes digital specialist services such as Xaxis, Quisma and H-art. The acquisition also marks a further step towards WPP’s goal of developing its networks in fast-growth markets and sectors and continues WPP’s strategy of strengthening the Group’s capabilities in digital media.
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